Lydia Millet - Mermaids in Paradise - A Novel

I saw now, despite the purple, owlish rings the mask had made around her eyes, that she didn’t necessarily have a derelict/unstable aspect after all. Her look was more take-charge than that of a disordered, rootless individual tragically amputated from society. She was mannish, yes, but now I considered how that mannishness might be helping her, in this new, albeit temporary, leadership role. Those eyebrows, with their insectoid appearance, reminded me of Stalin eyebrows, come to think of it. So many despot eyebrows, in the past, had been untrammeled, left to sprout free, and maybe hers were a bow to this authoritarian eyebrow styling. And the faint mustache on her upper lip, the furry rim, that too could be a nod in the direction of Stalin. . not that she was a despot. I thought her rule was mostly benevolent.

I’m no expert on the discovery of new species, needless to say, but from my amateur perspective — considering we were in completely uncharted mermaid territory — she had a decent grip.

I BARELY RECALL the rest of the day, which turned into a boozefest. Because of the embargo we didn’t want to celebrate in public, so as the afternoon wore on Chip and I found ourselves letting more and more members of the expedition into our cabana — Nancy’s cabana was smaller, since she was on a tighter budget. Before the drinking began, she made calls and confirmed that a first-contact scholar was winging it our way, the Berkeley anthropologist. So there we were, under a gag order, confronted with the existence of beings as improbable as unicorns — hell, more improbable, even.

We waited for the anthropologist.

And while we waited, we blew off some steam. The videographer plugged his camcorder into the cabana’s flat-screen TV and our mermaid footage played across it in a loop, repeatedly; after the first few viewings the guests began to treat the bare-breasted fish/woman as scenery, wandering freely in front of the screen, mingling. As the evening wore on the mermaids seemed to swim among us, or we swum among them: they were there and then gone, with the flick of one tail, the flick of many. They were present, the main one’s face looking at us, and they were gone again, and again, and again. The flat-screen TV was like a massive fish tank in our midst, with various yellow and orange and spotted fish crossing the field of view, passing corals, passing the sunken plane, before the mermaids entered.

Though I knew it was embargoed, and I didn’t plan to share the pic with anyone, I wanted a shot for my records. So I took one, on the sly.

We circulated and talked around the sparse furniture and the dramatic displays of cut flowers, one of us posted as a sentinel at the doorway to make sure the secret video went unseen by others’ eyes. No strangers were allowed. We ordered more and more drinks via room service, through happy hour and into the sadder ones; we ordered individual drinks, then later whole bottles, which arrived on the golf carts with a generous surcharge. The servile young men dismounted from the cart and brought trays to our door.

Once or twice there was a scuffle at the threshold, a member of the party who wanted to smuggle in a loved one or friend. The Heartland man, for instance, was turned away by Nancy for trying to sneak in his wife; I think I hid my pleasure quite smoothly. Later a large man stationed himself outside our door, a large man in a flowery shirt. He was a hotel janitor by day, moonlighting for us in a freelance capacity, Chip told me, as a bouncer. That parrotfish expert had outsourced our security.

I can’t say my fellow party guests were above average, in terms of charisma, intelligence or conversational ability, but I felt like the mermaid sighting was bringing us together, creating a buzz of enjoyment — until I hit a wall around two in the morning and wanted nothing more than to fall into bed. But that option wasn’t available to me; our guests were still milling, tripping, laughing. The bearded old salt had taken up residence in the room’s puffiest chair, where he regaled his listeners with stories of diving deep into dangerous shipwrecks to “lay charges.” He’d blown up many a vessel in his day, it seemed, ranging from “amphibious assault ships” to “minesweepers.” He told stories of diving in Truk Lagoon, where a ghost fleet of Japanese ships lay filled with human skulls.

At that point I happened to glance at the bathroom door and saw the drunken Fox News spearfisherman rummaging in my tampon box. I watched the spearfisher rummage, I took it in stride, and then I cruised over there, casually interrupting him. You don’t really get to ask why, when you behold a thing like that, but the politeness vs. curiosity dilemma can be tense.

The spearfisher snatched his hand out of the box when he saw me coming; as I led him out of the bathroom he made small talk about mer-people’s gills — claimed he’d once known a guy from Montreal, a regular human who had a vestigial gill himself. Right on his neck, where the mermaids’ gills were. It sometimes leaked a clear substance.

“Actually that would most likely have been a pharyngeal slit,” said Nancy, appearing with her eyebrows. “Or groove. Not a vestigial gill. A layperson might call it a birth defect.”

“I don’t get it,” said Chip, who’d detached himself from old Navy guy. “Why do those mermaids even have gills? I mean wouldn’t they be marine mammals? I mean they have breasts, right? And hair. So aren’t they, like, mammals? Like sea lions and dolphins? Those guys don’t need gills. So why would mermaids?”

“It’s very exciting!” cried Nancy. “Of course, gills are far more efficient than lungs at extracting oxygen. They have to be. It’s hard to breathe seawater. Less oxygen in water than air. Gills could have been an evolutionary advantage for the mers. Particularly if they have lungs too. They may have both, in fact. It’s not impossible.”

“The ‘mers’?” I asked.

“ Mer-people could be read as a colonialist term,” explained the biologist. “Racist and hegemonic. It’d be my own proposal that, until we learn the culture’s own name for itself — assuming the culture has language qua language, which is a major leap — we shorten our label to mer , or mers , plural. It’s relatively value-neutral. Just the French word for sea .”

“Huh?” said the tampon fisherman. “French? Why goddamn French? They should be flattered we’re calling them people! It’s a goddamn compliment!”

“Well, imagine a highly intelligent race of eels. .” said the biologist.

“No, man,” the fisherman interrupted. “I don’t want to.”

“. . and when these intelligent eels discovered our own species,” the biologist went on, “they then referred to us as land eels . Would that seem like a compliment to you?”

“I wouldn’t take it personally ,” said Chip.

“Makes no sense. We don’t look like an eel,” said the fisherman.

“My anthro colleague knows this stuff better than I do,” admitted Nancy.

I guess the sensitivity racket was mostly for the humanities.

We heard a crash and turned — it was the man from the Heartland, who must have snuck in, without his wife this time, when I wasn’t paying attention. Like the spearfisher he’d been nosing around in my business, it looked like, because he was squatting in the open closet, where my clothes were, and as I drew closer I saw an iron from the top shelf had fallen. He was prodding the top of his head with two fingers. Our clock radio lay entwined with the iron on the carpet, two black cords spiraling.